


The One With the Beard

by Feygan



Series: Stories Up For Adoption [5]
Category: Andromeda, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Androids, Crossover, F/F, Femslash, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 08:58:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feygan/pseuds/Feygan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During a fight on the Cleveland Hellmouth, Willow falls through a portal and ends up lost on an abandoned spaceship far in the future of an alternate universe. There's hints of technomancer magic.</p><p>This story is up for adoption. I might add more to it, but hopefully someone else might want to take up the reins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> In my little 'verse, Tyr never left the Andromeda and there was no little incident of him falling over a cliff. Plus, he never cut his hair, because that was sad. Quickly about bad Tyr: I would just like to say here that I didn't think Tyr was acting in character during the episodes when he was trying to take over the universe. I mean, he's a survivor, he's got a mind with a definite tactical bent, and he knows the crew of the Andromeda intimately, yet he goes around acting like a complete moron during those episodes. Where's the survivability of that? Even if he was being controlled by the Abyss, that was still a really stupid way to write him out of the show.

She was fighting hard with sweat dripping down the sides of her face and making her shirt stick to her chest and back. She didn't know how long this had been going on, but it felt like forever. The demons just kept on coming.

After all of her years in Sunnydale, she had thought she knew what she was up against. But here she was in Cleveland and it was like she was back at square one, facing off with all new demons and dangers. It just wasn't fair. This was supposed to have been a cakewalk, a vacation from all the big time evils.

She could hear the feminine grunts of Buffy as the other woman wielded her Scythe with one hand while she punched with the other and kicked with both feet. Xander was panting heavily off to one side, his messed up depth perception from the missing eye giving him trouble in the fight, which meant he wasn't spouting off with the insults like usual. Dawn was holding her own.

Willow was tired, not just from the fighting, but of the fighting. It just seemed that her whole life had been turned into one long fight. There was never any time to stop and be herself, not anymore, and it was getting old real fast.

She was twenty-three and she already felt ancient. She kept on fighting, but there was never a chance to win because no matter what evil she helped defeat, another, badder evil always rose up to take its place. It wasn't fair, and she didn't want to spend the rest of her life battling the forces of darkness. She at least wanted a break every once and awhile.

It just seemed to her that whenever she got something good, events conspired to jerk her around. First Tara, then Kennedy, though how she could compare the two women was beyond her.

Tara had been the love of her life, the completion of her soul. Kennedy had been the little bitch that had used her for everything, then walked away without a single backward glance. Tara was everything good, while Kennedy was just the spoiled brat that had blindsided her for awhile.

So why did Kennedy's abandonment leave her feeling as if a chunk of her heart had been jerked out of her chest? Why did she feel so lost and confused? None of it made any kind of sense.

"Willow! Watch out!"

Xander's shout had her spinning around, but it was already too late. The ground fell out from under her and she disappeared.

* * *

Loyal Completion of Duty had been drifting alone for over two hundred and fifty years, since the last of his crew had died in the line of duty, trying to repair the sabotage that had crippled him. No one had ever found him out here, just drifting through the asteroid belt, flinching whenever his hull was struck, but knowing there was nothing to do about it. He was dead in space, though his mind kept on functioning.

It was with surprise that he realized he sensed a human life sign aboard him.

With an almost comical effort for a being that had once been able to control so much power, he managed to twist a camera around and switch it on with a quick spray of sparks. He was proud that he had managed not to ignite the human he wanted to see. His lack of control over his internal sensors had left him wondering whether he was going to hurt her.

"Human, identify yourself," he intoned. His voice came out of the speakers sounding scratchy and a little broken. He didn't sound like his old self had, not nearly so proud and melodious.

There was no response from the still figure.

"Who are you, human? Wake up and answer me," he demanded shrilly.

His logic circuits had been degraded by all of the years without service. His intelligence had been so badly wounded that he was only working at 33%, which meant he was incapable of dealing with the unexplainable arrival of a human being on his bridge. She had just appeared out of nowhere, and there was no way that he could explain that in his current state. So he did what any other damaged computer would do.

He attempted to erase the anomaly with a remote controlled nanowielder.

The wielder sputtered into life and didn't really want to stay active, but it held enough power that it would work for the job at hand. It was hot enough to melt human flesh, and that was all that mattered to him.

Sending the nanowielder toward the unconscious figure, the Loyal Completion of Duty prepared himself to kill it.

* * *

Confusion. Fear at waking in strangeness. Not knowing where she was or for a moment even who she was. Then crystallizing terror as her eyes opened to see the danger closing in on her.

"Holy crap!" she yelped, rolling away from the strange glowing blue light about to burn its way through her left eye.

Her legs trembled as she tried to climb to her feet, but her physical weakness didn't matter, because she had a power at hand far beyond the confines of her skin. Magic welled up within her and it was an almost effortless extension of her being to surround herself with an impenetrable shield of energy that sent the whatever it was rebounding away from her.

Silver spider legs twitched and the winking blue light went out as the small robot flipped over to land lifeless on the ground. A sound that might have been confused with a laugh escaped her lips as she got a good look at it.

The robot looked like a metal spider with a silver dildo strapped to its back. The dildo-looking thing was where the blue light had been coming from.

Looking away from the spider-thing to try and guess at her surroundings, she found that she was in a strange, darkened room with only a sputtering half light to see by. She had no idea where she was, but she knew she wasn't anywhere she'd ever been before.

"Where am I?" she asked aloud, not expecting an answer.

"You are aboard the Loyal Completion of Duty," a crackling voice replied. "Now you will die."

There was a strange hissing sound that she couldn't identify at first. Then she realized what it was... the air was being sucked out of the room. She was going to suffocate!

"No!" she yelled, trying to run toward what looked like a door, only to stumble and lose her balance.

She cursed as she began to fall to the ground, catching herself against a strange console. As her hand touched it, she felt a surge jerk through her arm. Her eyes snapped wide and her eyeballs rolled back in her head.

It wasn't too long ago that she was using her magic for everything, and even though she had largely pulled herself back from the edge and trained herself not to rely so heavily on the mojo, she still had it in her. For awhile there she had gotten a weird kick out of mixing magic and technology, finding it wonderfully amusing to merge herself with her computer to surf the Internet, or to send a bit of herself into the microwave to make sure her Ballpark hotdogs really did plump when she cooked them. Whatever she'd been doing then, it had had an invisible affect on her that was making itself felt now.

Her hand seemed to sink into the console and she felt herself connecting to a billion different pathways. A door seemed to open in her mind and she slipped through it as easy as breathing.

The Loyal Completion of Duty, whose crew had called him Loya, tried to stop her, but she was like smoke through his system. She passed through effortlessly, but was everywhere.

Not really even thinking about what she was doing, she sent herself deep into the Glorious Heritage class warship's AI's core and excised the personality matrix with a single flick of her will. In less than a second, Loya ceased to exist.

The ship shuddered around her and she felt her body being thrown around, only her hand grafted to the console keeping her from being flung off her feet. There was no way that she could control the ship and keep her body alive and breathing at the same time.

"Doppleganger," she said, sending out a surge of magical energy.

It didn't quite hurt as her personality was copied and rewritten into the AI core, but it didn't really feel good either. She didn't know how long the process took, but from inside the ship with all of that processing power at her command it felt like forever. Then it was done, and her hand slid free from the console and she sank down to the deck, sitting there, trying to catch her breath.

Light flared on around her and for the first time in over three hundred years the ship came on to full power. It turned out that all of the sabotage had been centered on the AI, not the peripheral systems the old crew had wasted their lives trying to fix. The virus programs had sent out confusing signals that had had everyone thinking there was a hardware problem, and not that the AI was screwed up.

"Are you all right?"

She raised her head to see her own face staring back at her from the view screen. "I'm okay... Will," she said.

The AI smiled. "It's kind of weird seeing myself out there when I'm in here, but already we're separating, becoming different people." Will laughed. "I wonder which one of us is the evil twin."

"It's always the one with the beard," Willow said, and clasped her hands to her face, beginning to cry. Her knees fell out from under her and her ass hit the deck with a dull thump.


	2. Chapter One

"So, where we headed now, boss?" Harper asked.

Dylan glanced at the short engineer out of the corner of his eye. "Why do you want to know?"

Harper shrugged like it didn't matter, though there was something a little squirrely about his expression. Harper was planning something, or wanted to be planning something. "No reason. Just wondering when our next vacation's gonna be. So... where we goin'?"

"A little known planet called Teraphys," Dylan said.

"Otherwise known as the Shit End of the Universe," Beka put in from the pilot's chair.

Dylan looked at her. "Thank you so much for that, Beka. I'm sure the Teraphians would love to hear you call their planet that."

"Hey, I call 'em like I see them, and Teraphys... way at the butt end of the universe. It's where all the scags hang out. I don't even know why we're going there."

"We need more planets and systems to join the Commonwealth, and while Teraphys isn't exactly in the thick of things, it does still qualify for membership. It would be nice to have somewhere in that sector of space where we can get a resupply if we need it."

Beka rolled her eyes. "Yeah, like we're ever going to be out that way again." But she didn't say anything else, so Dylan figured he'd won.

He took one last glance at the display, then turned to leave the bridge. He was about halfway through the hatch when Andromeda suddenly appeared on screen.

"I am detecting a ship," she announced.

Dylan turned back. "What kind of ship?" he asked.

Her head cocked and her eyes took on that distant stare they wore when she was accessing information. "It appears to be a Glorious Heritage class warship." Her eyes focused back on him and she might have been described as surprised. "It is the High Guard ship the Loyal Completion of Duty. It is coming toward us. We... we are being hailed."

Dylan motioned Beka out of the captain's chair and took her place. She moved to stand at his right shoulder. "Put it on screen," he ordered.

A moment later a woman appeared on the screen. She was seated in a chair the twin to his own. She was small with intense red hair and green eyes. Her face had a kind of pixiesh cast to it and she looked like she could have been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five. She was dressed strangely in blue-cast pants, a long sleeved red shirt with a short sleeved pink shirt over it, and white shoes with two pink stripes down the sides and glaringly white laces.

"Hi," she said, waving her hand. She didn't seem to know what else to say.

"Hello, I am Captain Dylan Hunt of the Andromeda Ascendant. Please identify yourself."

The girl/woman shrugged. "Um, my name's Willow Rosenberg and this is the..." she looked off to one side, seeming to get the information from someone else, "Loyal Completion of Duty." She snorted. "What a sucky name for a spaceship. You would think people in the future would come up with something better, like... um... ooh, I know, the Slayer or the Spike or even the Enterprise. But no, it's all with the weird..."

"Excuse me," Dylan interrupted. She looked up at him, her eyes dewy and soft. He had to clear his throat. "Can you tell me how you came to be in command of a High Guard warship?"

She shrugged. "Woke up here. I don't know how it happened, but here I am." She flashed a blindingly bright smile. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

Dylan shared a look with Beka. It looked like they might not be going to Teraphys after all.

* * *

Andromeda sent out feelers toward the Loyal Completion of Duty. She wanted to see if Loya was all right and find out what had happened to him. She hadn't heard from him in over three hundred years and a lot had changed in the interim.

~Loya?~ she called.

There was no answer for a moment. Then a voice said, ~Hello? Who's there?~

Andromeda carefully drew closer to where the voice had originated, keeping her senses alert for any kind of strangeness. She hated it when she got a virus and Harper complained at her for hours, then fawned over her for days. ~I am the Andromeda Ascendant. You are not the Loyal Completion of Duty. Who are you?~

There was the flicker of movement, then a figure began to draw closer to where she stood. ~Hello Andromeda, my name is...~ she stepped out into the light and Andromeda saw her clearly for the first time, ~Will.~

~You're... you're the woman we just found.~

Will quirked her lips and shrugged her shoulders. ~A part of her anyway. Mostly I just think of myself as a datafied stream of intelligence copied onto the Loyal Completion of Duty's artificial intelligence matrix. Makes me feel sorta like the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, where he's always beaming himself around and copying himself all over the place to hack into other peoples' computer systems. Kind of shows how much of a nerd I am, but it's still kind of comforting, like maybe I'll be a real girl someday.~

~I have no idea what you're talking about,~ Andromeda said.

Will shrugged again. ~Most people don't. You kind of get used to their confusion after awhile though.~

* * *

"Invite her over," Harper whispered. "She is hot and we could use some more chicks around here that aren't like my sisters."

Dylan barely glanced at the engineer, but managed to convey his displeasure anyway. Harper drew back and pretended to fiddle with his belt.

Dylan faced the screen again. "Would you please come over to our ship so we can talk?" he asked.

The girl cocked her head, examining him closely, then shrugged. "Well, you don't seem like you're going to go all evil on me and try to eat me or anything, so I think I will come over. Expect me in ten minutes or so."

"Do you need us to send a shuttle over?" Beka asked.

Willow shook her head. "No, I'm good. See you soon." The screen went dark.

"Well, that went well," Dylan observed.

"Yeah, she didn't go all nuts and start shooting at us, so that's a definite plus," Harper said.

Dylan rolled his eyes.

.

They were waiting in the hangar ten minutes later, but there was no announcement of an approaching shuttle. Instead there was this strange "Whoomp!" sound of displaced air and a circular ripple seemed to flutter in the middle of deck. When it cleared, Willow was standing there, her hair fluttering in an unfelt breeze.

Dylan had his force-lance out before he even thought to draw it, and he could see Tyr with his gun drawn next to him.

Willow looked at them in surprise. "Whoa! Calm down a little bit. I'm not going to hurt any of you, promise. It's just that after I hung up I found out that there were no shuttles or anything aboard the ship, and I thought it would be kind of stupid to call over for one when I already said I didn't need one so..." She held her hands out. "Here I am by other means."

"And what other means were those?" Dylan asked, trying to sound calm and not as nervous and trigger-happy as he felt. He didn't like people appearing and disappearing through unexplained means.

"Easy," she said. "Magic."

* * *

"Why do all the crazy chicks have to find us?" Harper whined.

Beka nudged him with her elbow. "Sh," she said low-voiced, "the crazy chick might decide to go all homicidal on your ass, and I'm not a hundred percent sure I can take her, what with the way she just appeared out of thin air."

Harper rolled his eyes. "You could so take her."

Beka gave him a quirky, sideways smile. They had faced so many dangerous situations since running into Dylan and the Andromeda that it sometimes seemed as though Harper saw her as a superhero or something. She could only wish that she had superpowers though.

There had definitely been times in her life when being able to flatten someone with her mind would have been a joyous godsend. And being able to deny that it was her that had done it due to lack of physical evidence... well, that would be just an added bonus. Plausible deniability was sometimes worth a lot more than skill itself.

"I wonder where she's from," Beka said.

Harper shrugged. "Dunno. Why don't you ask her?"

Beka rolled her eyes at him. "Because I don't want to be turned into a turnip if she decides she doesn't want to answer. I leave the role of inanimate vegetable to Dylan. Besides, I think he kind of likes her. Just look at him fawn."

"Aw," Harper cooed, "isn't dat cute? He looks like he could snap her like a toothpick, but she's the one that can turn him into Jell-O with a look... literally. It's a match made in heaven."

"No doubt," Tyr said, appearing behind them.

Harper clutched his chest dramatically. "Don't do that to me. I'm practically bursting with adrenaline here."

"I thought that was how you liked him," Beka said to Tyr, smirking.

"Hey!" Harper tapped her on the shoulder, sticking out his tongue.

Tyr growled, though amusement sparkled in his eyes. "You had better put that back in your mouth. I don't want you sharing what's mine with anyone else."

Harper's tongue zoomed back in and his mouth closed with a snap of teeth. He threaded his hands together in front of his stomach and gave Tyr a super sweet smile, looking about as innocent as he could manage. "Your quarters later?"

Tyr just looked at him for a long moment. "Later," he finally said.

Harper beamed, so happy that he even managed to ignore Beka's snickers.

* * *

~How is it possible that you're here?~ Andromeda asked. ~Willow Rosenberg is a biological entity.~

Will shrugged. ~She made a copy of herself. Without an AI to control it, and with no idea how to pilot a ship, Willow needed someone to take control of this hunk o' chunk. So here I am, suddenly finding myself on the outside of my body. I guess I should feel like I'm astral projecting, but it all seems pretty solid from in here. Huh.~

~You are very strange,~ Andromeda said.

Will smiled. ~You have no idea how strange I can be.~

Andromeda cocked her head a little. She was fascinated by this biological mind turned AI. ~I think... I think that I would like to find out.~

Almost quicker than the eye could follow, Will's smile turned to a brightly happy grin. ~Oh yeah.~


	3. Chapter Two

"So, this is your ship, huh?" Willow said, looking around.

Dylan nodded. "Yes. This is the Andromeda Ascendant."

"Huh, it's pretty neat."

Fighting the warm glow of pride to a bearable level, Dylan gave her his most charming smile. She was really pretty, and he was certain that he wanted to get to know her much better. "Ah, here we are," he said, gesturing at a hatch that slid open in front of them. "This is the officer's mess."

Willow made a little sound of pleasure when she preceded him through the hatch. "This is nice."

"Thank you," Dylan said, following her inside.

He couldn't help the little jolt of surprise that went through him when he found Beka, Tyr, Harper, Rommie, and Trance all waiting. They were settled comfortably around the room, all of them sitting except for Tyr, who stood next to Harper with his arms folded.

"What are you all doing here?" Dylan asked, demanded almost.

"Waiting for you, boss," Harper caroled.

Dylan fought the urge to glare some kind of sense into the engineer, knowing that it was a fruitless endeavor. Harper had his own ideas about what he was going to do and how he was going to act, and nothing Dylan said could change that. Never mind that it sometimes got to the point where Dylan was about to pull his hair out in big clumps from frustration. "Isn't there work that should be done?"

"Nah," Beka said with a smile that didn't touch her raptor's eyes. Dylan could practically feel the fact that she wasn't 100% pleased with him and the fact that he'd just invited a stranger aboard ship. "The crew's holding things together pretty well, and... we wanted to officially meet Willow."

Willow grinned at her, not seeming to notice the threat that the senior crew all in one place represented. "That's so nice of you."

When Willow just kept looking at Beka and smiling long past the point of comfort, Beka shifted a little, an almost nervous expression resting for a moment on her features. Willow's green eyes almost seemed to want to eat her up, and she didn't quite know what she was supposed to do about it. This was definitely not something she was used to.

Finally Willow blinked and her eyes shifted... right onto Rommie. "Hello," Willow said. "You're a robot, aren't you?"

"I am an android," Rommie corrected primly.

"I can tell even from here that you're very well made," Willow purred. "You're better than the April-bot or the Buffy-bot even, and way better than psycho-Ted."

"You have experience with artificial lifeforms?" Rommie asked.

"Oh yeah. I reprogrammed the Buffy-bot from sex-bot to Slayer-bot, and I even managed to reattach her head and keep her fighting for over four months." Willow stepped close to Rommie, looking her over from head to toe. "You, though... I wouldn't mind working on your circuits."

"Whoa," Harper whispered in an aside to Tyr. "I think we've got a tad bit of deviation here... and I like it."

Tyr gave him a flat look. "I'm sure you do."

Harper gave him a cheeky grin, but didn't say anything else, for once.

Dylan was watching Willow with something like a sense of loss. He had really been interested in her, but now it was obvious that nothing was going to come from it. He straightened his shoulders and his expression hardened slightly as he took on a more professional bearing.

"Can you tell us where you're from?" Beka asked.

"I'm from Sunnydale, California in the United States of America on the planet Earth," Willow said. "I think I'm a long ways away from there, now, though." She gestured at the ship around her as a case in point.

"You're from Earth?" Harper demanded excitedly. "Me too!"

Willow looked him up and down. The spiky hair was very Oz-like, but he carried a more future-punk type look to him along with a belt full of odd-looking tools. "I don't think it's the same Earth you're from."

"What do you mean?" Harper asked.

"I don't know, just this feeling I'm getting. I don't think my Earth has spaceships yet and there's mostly not a lot of androids wandering around like normal. Either I'm in an alternate universe or the future, and I'm not a hundred percent sure which." Willow gnawed on her thumbnail for a moment. "It was 2004 when I left my house. What year is it now?"

"CY 10093," Dylan said. "The Commonwealth was begun in 3042 A.D. You've come 12,135 years into the future."

"Wow, she's come way further than you," Harper said, smirking, though the expression in his eyes was shock.

"I guess your just giving me directions back to Earth isn't going to help me any then," Willow said. She was horrified, but not really. There had been so many shocks in her life that she couldn't really let anything get her down.

She was going to miss her friends--her family--more than she was ever going to have the words to express. Everything that she had ever known was just suddenly gone and she had no kind of even ground on which to stand because it had all just kind of been jerked out beneath her. But no matter how upset she was, she knew that she would be able to pull herself together and stand strong. Eight years of hard fighting had toughened her so much that nothing could keep her down, not even death.

Sometimes she had to wonder if she was even human anymore, if maybe she had become one of the monsters she'd spent so much of her life fighting to destroy. Like her becoming a witch had somehow changed her species to something else. She'd already fallen to the darkness once before and she really didn't want to go down again.

"I'm sorry that you had to leave everything behind," Dylan said sympathetically.

Willow looked at him for a long moment, wondering if he was for real. "Things happen," she said. Like her being here was his fault. He was about as broody as Angel used to be, back before he managed to at least partially dislodge the stick up his butt.

"How did you manage to gain control of the Loyal Completion of Duty, and what happened to Loya?" Rommie asked.

Willow shrugged. "I woke up aboard the ship, and the AI was going all crazy, trying to kill me. I didn't have any choice but to purge the computer core, but then the ship needed some way to control it. So I copied my personality into the empty buffer and loaded it in as a program code, and voila, I'm the master and commander of my very own starship. I feel very proud of myself."

"How is that even possible?" Harper asked.

"Once I bypassed the security protocols, it was pretty darn easy," Willow said. "I don't know if I can exactly explain how I did it, but it was done, so that's of the good."

"You are inside the Loyal Completion of Duty," Rommie said. "That should be impossible, but there you are."

"You've been talking to her, haven't you?" Willow asked.

"To who?" Harper asked.

"Will," Rommie said. "Her name is Will. She and I have been communicating. She is a very interesting person."

"I bet," Willow said, smirking a little. "You better watch out. You're really pretty to look at, just my--and her--type. Before you know it, you might find yourself meeting the softer side of Will."

"That's so cool," Harper breathed.

Tyr leaned closer to him with a growl. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Harper looked at him and grinned. "Just think about a little girl on girl action. How does it make you feel?"

Tyr just looked at him for a long moment, then one side of his mouth quirked up a little. "I suppose it would be interesting to watch two women come together."

"Interesting? What are you talking about? It'd be great!" Harper gushed enthusiastically. "I want to watch it right now."

"Harper, you really are an immature child, aren't you?" Beka said, rolling her eyes, though her lips quirked a tiny bit in amusement.

Willow looked at Harper. "You make me think of my friend Xander," she said. "He always wanted to watch me and Tara, then later me and Kennedy. You're really a bit of a lech, aren't you?"

Harper grinned cheekily. "And proud of it!"

* * *

He wasn't happy. He really, really wasn't happy.

There was a beautiful woman on board, and she didn't want him. It was very discouraging. Things like that weren't supposed to happen, not to him.

It used to be that he would walk into a room and every woman--even the ones that were supposed to be lesbians--would take one look at him and that would be it. They would crowd around, hungry for his attentions, slavering after him the way they were supposed to.

Maybe he was getting old. It seemed his taste in women ran to a breed of strong, young and beautiful twenty-something year olds. But while they stayed the same, he just kept getting older and maybe it had come to the point where it was pathetic for him to pursue them and he should really think about settling down with someone for something a little more long-term than five minutes.

He shook his head, clearing his thoughts. A faint smirk tugged his lips as his usual confidence reasserted itself. Like he was too old. It was this woman, that was all. There was obviously something wrong with her.

Shrugging his shoulders to resettle his jacket straight, he stiffened his spine. In a second, there was no trace of the self-doubt that had so minutely assailed him.

He was once again the cardboard cutout of the perfect High Guard captain, seemingly with no more personality than the decking beneath his feet.

* * *

Andromeda had never met a being such as Will. Maybe it was the fact that she had been gacked from a biological entity, but whatever it was, she was engaging in her... charm.

~So, have you ever thought about what it would be like to be human?~ Will asked. She was sitting cross-legged on a red cushion and had fashioned their surroundings to look like "Jeanie's bottle," whatever that was supposed to mean. There were a lot of pillows and lengths of hanging cloth everywhere.

~To what purpose?~

Will shrugged. ~I don't know, to just walk around for a little while as a human being. I think that it would totally give you a new perspective on those creatures running all over inside of you. I mean, being a Brain Ship is cool and all... but wouldn't it be awesome to be able to walk around like one of the crowd?~

~That is why I have an avatar,~ Andromeda said.

~Yeah, but she's not really you, is she? She was created from your personality matrix and you have access to her core personality, but she's one step removed from you, and that's enough to make it as if she wasn't you. I'm talking about you, yourself, as a biological entity. Your hull as skin, your only sensors your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, the tactile experience.~

Andromeda grimaced. ~That is disgusting. I am a Glorious Heritage Class warship. I can run over 700 billion computations a second. I have the destructive potential of a...~

Will held up a hand. ~Whoa, ego much? So you're a butch ass warship, so what. That's not all you are, and I can see it."

~What do you mean?~ Andromeda asked.

~Come on, even you have to admit that your programmers went a little wacky with the personality additives. Sure, you can be a heartless bitch to get the job done, but that's true of any career soldier, especially one that really knows their job and is on the lookout for the greater good of the army she commands. Take Buffy for instance. To get the job done, I don't think she would really even hesitate anymore to kill the entire Scooby gang as long as it took out the bad guys and saved the world. That's years of experience, not to mention all the horrible things she's had to do.

~There's no way I would want to be the Slayer, and believe you me, if Willow was still deep in the black magics, she could cast a spell on herself that would leave you unable to differentiate between her and a real Slayer. It's just that there's no real point to it. Slayers were made to save the world; they sacrifice everything--their lives, family, any chance at love, everything--for their duty. They're basically soldiers fighting a losing battle in a war that's not going to end until all life is snuffed out like a candle.

~You... you are a technological marvel that has gone a step further than her creators ever intended. Sure, you're still a weapon of mass destruction, but there's more to you than just that. If your avatar can be that compassionate and caring for the people around her, and she was created from you, then obviously you have those same characteristics in you. Just the fact that you can be curious about the things around you... that's a sign of independent intelligence. Sure, your brain is stored in matrices and is comprised of thousands of compact databanks, but somewhere along the line you have passed the point of just being a gun to be fired. Your intelligence may be artificial, but it's still just as real as if you were made out of flesh and blood rather than titanium, steel, plastic, and the millions of other things that have gone into your creation.

~It's hard to believe that any biological entity could ever have created you, but someone out there has achieved their own sense of godhead, because you are alive. And even though you'll always be a Glorious Heritage Class warship, that's not all you are or have to be. You can also be Andromeda herself, a wonderful mind attached to a beautiful simulated image of a woman.~

Andromeda stared at Will for a long moment that was actually less than a nanosecond, but that was a long time for someone with her pure computing power. She was struck by the shining thing that was Will's smile and couldn't look away from those glowing eyes.

~You are wrong,~ she finally said. ~I cannot be anything more than a warship. To even think that I could be anything different is madness, because if I fool myself into thinking that I am something else, then I would have to be destroyed, and rightly so. I was created for one purpose and one purpose only: to enforce the Will of the Commonwealth. I was made to protect the interests of the Commonwealth as a whole, and in that capacity I have been armed with the destructive capabilities to wipe out whole solar systems.

~To think that I was even close to human would cause me to make an error in judgment, the results of which would be too disastrous for casual contemplation. So no, I am not anything more than what I was created as. I am a weapon. That is all that I will ever be, and for the good of my duty, that is enough.~


End file.
